The aim of this text is to critically analyse which discursive power dynamics have been o fimportance in the evolution of the modern preschool. What are the underlying motives that led to the systematisation that has become so prevalent in our profession, and what changes has this led to in the preschool organization over time? From the 1990’s there has been a shift in the discourse concerning general welfare in Sweden, of which preschools are a part. With the introduction of New Public Management concepts such as quality, systematisation and competitiveness have become a part of the vocabulary in preschools. The introduction of these concepts has been instrumental in the creation of growt hand higher quality through a market-based approach and through systematic quality assurance. I wish to show through this text that this has largely been counterproductive. This shift in the discourse has not only created a new conceptual starting point but it also led to a differentiation in the roles associated with preschools as a workplace where the preschool teachers are given more and more responsibilities while the childcare workers are being made more invisible both in legislature and the curriculum. There has been an elevation in status for preschool teachers, however at the expense of both the organization and the childcare workerprofession. With the introduction of market orientation in Swedish education we are today expected to act according to a competitive approach where we are vying with others to attract custodians to our preschool. This has in turn led to a general view of custodians as customers. However, with the usage of the word customer there is an expectation of adaptability in orderto maintain our competitiveness in relation to the wishes of the customer. In this text I thereby discuss if this is an applicable terminology in the context of preschools and whether we are able to maintain the purpose of our profession when confronted with custodians as customers. This essay also discusses the importance of resisting and reclaiming the discourse occurring in preschools. We are constantly being influenced in our approach of ourselves through the societal view of our profession and I wish to show how we through trust, a sense of community and peer learning could create a scientific foundation for our continued work. We should create our own legitimacy and professional identity. It is through this communal identity and approach that we can resist and reclaim the preschool discourse.

The BC Liberal New Era was an intense and often controversial period in the province's political history. One day after being sworn into office with a massive majority, Premier Gordon Campbell announced a 25 percent personal income tax cut, potentially relinquishing one billion dollars in tax revenue. Seven weeks later, Campbell and his Finance Minister followed up with another billion in business and corporate tax cuts. Based on the apparent success of tax cuts in provinces like Ontario, where tax cuts coincided with very strong economic growth, they believed tax cuts in 2001 would prove efficacious despite sharply declining economic indices. Cautionary advice was dismissed and tax cuts quickly translated into a $4.4 billion deficit and deep expenditure reductions for ministries other than Health, Education, and Advanced Education. Their decision proved to be a compelling, real-world example of prescription before diagnosis. The 2001/02 fiscal year sawonly 0.6 percent economic growth, much as the Ministry of Finance had predicted, not the 3.8 percent growth anticipated by the Premier and Finance Minister. An overall $4.4 billion deficit quickly translated into deep expenditure reductions for ivministries other thanHealth, Education, or Advanced Education. The latter ministries accounted for seventy percentof BC’s budget and were protected from cuts by a campaign commitment.Resource ministries were hit hard with cuts of up to 45 percent but could not come close to filling the budgethole. The New Era thus offers a second and stark example of prescriptionbefore diagnosis: the belief that social ministries could also manage deep budget cuts without detrimental consequences to the disadvantaged and vulnerable clients they served.Long before tax cut optimism began to fade, Campbell introduced an array of processes –like core review, deregulation, devolution,and alternative service delivery –drawn from other jurisdictions and, indirectly, from the tenets of New Public Management. Those processes were clearly designed to foster smaller government, prompting a critical question:was the introduction of dramatic tax cuts into a recessionary environment intended to produce aself-induced crisis, thereby underlining the imperative of austerity? My dissertation supportsthat suggestion, butalso concludes that the “burning platform” became a far greater conflagration than its authors anticipated. The BC Liberal New Era campaignplatform’s ambitious social policy agenda was consequently sacrificed to sustain its economic agenda. The New Era campaign document aimed to maximize voter appeal by promising “everything at the same time”and similar expectations drove New Era processes.Ministries were obliged to deliver on process goals as well asexpensive New Era platform commitments while simultaneously cutting staff and programs. Confronted by seemingly endless and intractable problems, ministries looked nationally and internationally for policy experience that might inform provincial solutions. Policy transfer produced mixed results. The New Era experience suggests that the frequency and intensity of process demands –compounded by budget-driven resource attrition –inhibited rather than fostered policy success. / Graduate / 2020-12-04

The point of this essay is to study a municipal owned company with the use of a case study on Höganäs Omsorg AB. Two theories has primarily been used which is New Public Management, which favors economic value, and Public Value Management, which favors social values. The two different theories have been applied on the municipal owned company to see how social and economic values are balanced in its governance. Höganäs Omsorg AB is a young municipal owned company where many parts of its organizational structure is still in development. The parts of the municipal owned company that still are in development are primarily within the economically favored theory New Public Management. In these early stages of the enterprise the social values have taken a greater place of the two values. It shows from how social aspects are present in every move the enterprise makes as economic values will have to take a slight step back occasionally to give space. One of the main reasons behind that social values has been favored within the enterprise is most likely thanks to that leadership positions in the municipal owned company and the municipality is held by the same individuals.

Forskning har visat att läraryrket har högre arbetsbelastning än andra undersökta yrkesgrupper. Det beror på att resursbegränsningar och andra sysslor tar för mycket tid från lärares huvudsyssla. En annan källa till lärares höga nivåer av arbetsbelastning är hot och våld på arbetsplatsen. Syftet med studien är att ge en inblick i lärare och pedagogers arbetsmiljö och bidra med kunskap om hot och våld i skolan. Studiens frågeställningar är: 1) Vilka erfarenheter har lärare och pedagoger av hot och våld i skolan? 2) Hur beskriver lärare och pedagoger sin arbetsmiljö? 3) Hur hanterar lärare och pedagoger hot och våld i skolan? För att besvara dessa frågeställningar genomfördes semi-strukturerade intervjuer med 10 deltagare som är verksamma inom kommunala grundskolor med högstadium. Det empiriska materialet presenteras tematiskt och analyseras utifrån teorierna New Public Management, Känsloarbete och Coping. Resultatet visade att deltagarna har erfarenheter av hot och våld i skolan. Trots det beskriver många att arbetsmiljön är bra. Lärare och pedagoger hanterar hot och våld med känsloarbete och copingstrategier som manifesteras genom bland annat förminskning och normalisering av händelser. Studiens resultat var överlag i linje med vad tidigare forsknings hittat, däremot ansåg deltagarna att individanpassad skolgång var en positiv utveckling vilket gick emot tidigare forskningsresultat.

The elderly care sector is facing high demands in the context of demographic change. In regard to the high potential of efficiency increase, the area has been restructured particularly strongly based on principles of the New Public Management (NPM) since the 1970s. This thesis aims to investigate the influences of NPM on elderly care and the effects on care staff and people in need of care by means of a qualitative approach based on a qualitative content analysis. Through a holistic perspective, the role of social work as a profession and possible changes within the welfare state structures of Germany and Sweden is explored. The findings convey a rather negative experience of the impact of NPM and is characterized in both countries by a high degree of privatization, standardization and economization in care. Due to higher workloads and fewer resources, the pressure on staff in care is high. In addition, services for those in need of care are reduced and the quality of care suffers from the staff’s high workload. The objective of care is affected by the implementation of NPM and entails a change in the profession, which needs to be viewed critically based on the results.

For several decades, there has been a transfer of ideas from the private sector to the public sector on how to modernize the organization. One widespread idea is the service guarantee. However, when ideas are transferred from one domain to another and implemented in a different context, they are also always transformed. This report centres on what happened in practice when service guarantees were introduced into two Swedish municipalities. The purpose of the study is to investigate how the employees perceived the implementation of a public service guarantee and its impact on the employees in the organization. The study points to the difficulty of transferring the ​​service guarantee idea to the public sector and to reproduce it successfully. The study indicates that the existence of the service guarantee is questioned, and gives rise to new goal conflicts when operating plans are made. Employees expect managers to be committed, while describing a status quo situation. The study indicates that the service guarantee has only become an unexploited symbolic tool in the development of quality assurance. / Offentlig sektor har sedan flera decennier tillbaka hämtat idéer från den privata sektorn för att modernisera organisationen. En idé som fått en stor spridning är tjänstegarantier. När idéer ska hämtas ut, överföras och införas mellan olika kontexter sker alltid en omformning av idén. Denna rapport berör vad som händer i praktiken när tjänstegarantier har införts i två svenska kommuner. Studiens syfte har varit att undersöka hur anställda upplever implementeringen av tjänstegarantier och vilka konsekvenser tjänstegarantin får för anställda i organisationen. Resultaten från studien visar på svårigheten att fånga idén med tjänstegarantier och att reproducera idén framgångsrikt. Av studien framgår det att tjänstegarantins existens är ifrågasatt och när verksamheten ska planeras uppstår nya målkonflikter. Anställda efterfrågar chefernas engagemang samtidigt som anställda beskriver en obetänksam tillbakastyrning. Studien pekar på att tjänstegarantin bara blivit ett symboliskt verktyg i utvecklingen av kvalitet.

Denna studie syftar till att öka förståelse för hur new public management påverkat bildämnet i gymnasieskolan. Studien har utförts genom kvalitativa intervjuer med fyra bildlärare på tre gymnasieskolor och deras utsagor har analyserats utifrån en ramfaktorteori där ramfaktorerna är baserade på Anna Annerbergs påståenden om hur lärare påverkas av new publicmanagement. Resultatet visa att bildlärarna är kritiska till läroplanen. Informanterna menar att läroplanen är vag och har ett svårtolkat språk. Bildlärarna menar vidare att de inte kan vara säkra på vilka förväntningar som ställs på undervisningen. I och med detta uttrycker informanterna att de dock har en stor frihet när det kommer till undervisningen, vilket de tycker är positivt. Informanterna tycker att elevernas lärande står i centrum. Däremot belyser de att det finns en problematik kring att allt som skapas och görs i klassrummet ska bedömas. Detta då de anser att det i estetiska ämnen kräver övning innan elevers uppgifter kan bedömas och betygsättas. Detta har lett till att många lärare inom bildämnet avviker från läroplanens krav på betygsättning för att skapa utrymme för lärande gentemot eleverna.

This study has aimed to investigate the new regulation of the superintendent that was introduced at the turn of the year 2019, which states that the superintendent shall assist the local politics and school boards. The overall purpose of this study is to increase knowledge about how a legal regulation of the superintendency affects school governance and management in the governance chain. Underlying issues are: how the regulation in the Education Act has been interpreted by various actors in the school area and whether the superintendents themselves believe that the regulation has affected their position and function. To investigate this, various government documents and investigations concerning the regulation of the superintendent are studied, a number of actors in the chain of command are interviewed about the new regulation and the individual opinions of the superintendents have been obtained via a survey. To put the superintedent in a context, I have highlighted theories of state governance, New Public Management and trust-based governance. To understand the superintendent arena and what governs the superintendent, I have used six dimensions of power and a framework that defines what governs the superintendent room for maneuver. The results show that the superintendent function will be affected by the new regulation. Whether the chain of command will become clearer, there are no unambiguous answers neither from those who have been interviewed nor the superintendent. On the other hand, there are several among those who have been interviewed who claim that the superintendent regulation can result in a conflict of power between, among others, local politics and the superintendent, the superintendent and the school principal. Furthermore, another issue found are difficulties with the regulation because the Swedish municipalities have different size and different organization including the difference of structure of the political boards, which affects the effects of the regulation of the superintendent.

This paper has investigated the right to equivalent education in compulsory school for pupils with learning disabilities. What has been investigated is what is the right to equivalent education and factors such as finances, equivalent and quality within two Swedish municipalities. The study has examined with the help of New public management and implementation theories to investigate how two municipalities work with implementing political decisions but also how they are steering, controlling and the evaluation of school administration and pupils. The study concludes that a policy on equivalent education may be needed to increase the equivalent for students in the compulsory school for pupils with learning disabilities. The study has also concluded that there are two key concepts that increase equivalence for students in compulsory school for pupils with learning disabilities, it's the need of the pupils and their knowledge development to enchur equivalent education. The two municipalities and the school administration need to work on is: to have a good foundation in the schools' systematic quality work to achieve the requirements of the Education Act and the curriculum from the National Agency for Education, the goal of new public management to be achieved. It turns out that the municipalities' financial management is partly crucial for the school's development especially with teacher density and competent staff. Neither municipality has a successful implementation due to the municipalities being in different phases in the policy process for the systematic quality work and the work in the school administration.Something from the two municipalities is that it is complex to work and manage the compulsory school for pupils with learning disabilities where the state of Gothenburg works with a systematic work to follow the law and curriculum while Laxå municipality works more on a value- based system on students' needs. To have a clear path on what equivalent education for pupils in the compulsory school for pupils with learning disabilities it's that they need both the structure that the state of Gothenburg has and the value- based system on needs Laxå municipality has. There is a need for further research on what type of policy to ensure equivalent education in compulsory school for pupils with learning disabilities.

Abstrakta ord som lycka, kvalitet och rikedom används dagligen i vardagsspråket, och vi förstår allt som oftast hur dessa ska tolkas beroende på kontexten. Svårighet uppstår dock när man försöker avgränsa dessa otydliga begrepp och definiera vad som ingår och inte ingår i dem. När tolkningsbara begrepp ligger till grund för beslutsfattande inom myndigheter kan det således tendera att bli upp till den enskilde tjänstepersonen att tolka dem. Syftet med den här studien är att försöka förstå hur bruket av icke definierade begrepp inom myndighetsutövning skapar praktiker hos enskilda tjänstemän, samt huruvida dessa är kopplade till strategisk styrning. Med studien vill jag diskutera hur strategisk vaghet används som ett sätt att styra subjekt i deras tjänstemannautövning. Studiens kanske främsta bidrag till kunskapsbyggandet är dess kvalitativa ansats och intervjubaserade metod som används för att förstå individens subjektiva upplevelse av en diskurs som praktiserar vaga begrepp. Det teoretiska ramverk som studien vilar på utgörs främst av Jürgen Habermas teori om det kommunikativa handlandet och universalpragmatiken samt Michel Foucaults teorier om styrningsmentalitet och diskursiva praktiker. Studien visar att intervjupersonerna upplever krav på effektivitet och rationalitet uppifrån samtidigt som de upplever ett ständigt flöde av nya, vaga begrepp samt att de upplever en strävan efter att komma överens snarare än att fokusera på vad man kommer överens om. Resultaten i studien pekar på att icke definierade begrepp kan vara ett resultat av en politisk styrning som är tätt sammankopplad med de spänningar som uppstår när kvantifierbara mål tillåts regera över kvalitativa resurser. Min förhoppning med studien är att påvisa hur krav på kontroll och rationalitet inom offentlig förvaltning paradoxalt nog kan leda till att en diskursiv vaghet reproduceras på individnivå för att uppnå effektiva beslutsprocesser.